How to make grep only match if the entire line matches?

grep -Fx ABB.log a.tmp

From the grep man page:

-F, --fixed-strings
Interpret PATTERN as a (list of) fixed strings
-x, --line-regexp
Select only those matches that exactly match the whole line.


Simply specify the regexp anchors.

grep '^ABB\.log$' a.tmp

Most suggestions will fail if there so much as a single leading or trailing space, which would matter if the file is being edited by hand. This would make it less susceptible in that case:

grep '^[[:blank:]]*ABB\.log[[:blank:]]*$' a.tmp

A simple while-read loop in shell would do this implicitly:

while read file
do 
  case $file in
    (ABB.log) printf "%s\n" "$file"
  esac
done < a.tmp

Here is what I do, though using anchors is the best way:

grep -w "ABB.log " a.tmp

Tags:

Unix

Shell

Grep